Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages

University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 2010 Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages Adam Robert Lucas University of Wollongong, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Lucas, Adam Robert, Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages 2010. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/1831 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 967 Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages N Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages A. Introduction Narratives of technological revolution in the Middle Ages are a distinctively 20th-century phenomenon. First articulated by a handful of influential French, British and American historians between the 1930s and 1950s, they can be genealogically linked to narratives of progress across a number of arts and social science disciplines which have invoked the language of revolutionary rupture to characterize a number of notable transformations in human cultures and societies between the Neolithic and modern periods. Two kinds of technological revolution have been claimed for the Euro- pean Middle Ages by 20th-century scholars: an ‘agricultural revolution’ of the 6th to 9th centuries, and an ‘industrial revolution’ of the 11th to 14th centuries. Scholarly claims for both an industrial revolution and an agricultural revolution in the Middle Ages can be traced back to the 1930s, although they did not become full-blown narratives until the 1950s. Such claims have a relatively complex lineage, but are perhaps best understood as part of a western intellectual tradition going back to the Enlightenment which has sought to account for the radical social and political changes that have occurred throughout the world since industrialization with reference to the marriage of practical and theoretical knowledge characteristic of the modern period. The term ‘revolution’ gained currency and has been widely deployed during the modern period to denote a significant change in the politics, economy or culture of a given society or group of societies over a relatively short period of time. Generally speaking, revolutionary political changes have been identified with particular nations or countries, such as the French Rev- olution of 1789–1799, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, and are of com- paratively short duration. Revolutionary cultural changes, on the other hand, such as the Scientific Revolution of ca. 1540–1690 and the Industrial Revol- ution of c. 1760–1850 transcend national boundaries, are generally held to be regional in character, and can occur over a period of a century or more. This essay focuses on the use of a particular style of cultural revolution narrative – that of technological revolution – in historical writings from the AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages 968 20th century about the European Middle Ages. It seeks to explain the social and political context within which such narratives first arose and how they appear to be genealogically related. The problems with and difficulties aris- ing from individual revolutionary narratives are then flagged, with readers directed to the relevant critical literature. The article concludes with some generic observations about the use of such narratives in contemporary his- toriography. B. Narratives of Cultural Revolution in the History of Science and Technology Narratives of cultural revolution, particularly in relation to developments in science and technology, have been a common feature of western intellectual discourse since the early 17th century. The use of titles such as Physiologia Nova De Magnete, Magneticisque Corpori- bus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure by William Gilbert (1544–1603), and the Novum Organum and Instauratio Magna by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), were squarely aimed at distinguishing the intellectual contributions of these early modern scholars from their scholastic and classical predecessors, and setting them- selves up as the new authorities on the subjects about which they wrote. Contemporaries of key figures in the Scientific Revolution, such as William Harvey (1578–1657) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), were already describing their contributions to natural philosophy, physiology, and the mathematical sciences as ‘revolutionary:’ not in the classical sense of an as- tronomical cycle or periodic return (as invoked by Renaissance humanists to describe their efforts to return to the Greek and Roman roots of European knowledge ‘purified’ of Islamic and scholastic influences), but in the sense of the overturning of traditional knowledge structures and authorities with long-term consequences. For example, a contemporary of Galileo, Raffaello Maggiotti (1597–1658), wrote to him in 1637 that Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood “will suffice to revolutionize all of medicine, just as the invention of the telescope has done for astronomy, the compass has done for commerce, and artillery has done for the whole military art” (Jerome Bylebyl, “William Harvey: A Conventional Medical Revolutionary,” Journal of the American Medical Association 239 [1978]: 1295–98). Maggiotti’s argument was a variation on those made by Bacon and others before him that “printing, gunpowder and the magnet […] have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world” (Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620, Bk. 1, aphorism 129). It was not until the Enlightenment, however, that the now widely accepted modern sense of revolution as the rapid or violent overthrow of existing AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR 969 Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages political and cultural norms and institutions came into common usage. Con- temporary historians of science such as I. Bernard Cohen, David Lindberg, and H. Floris Cohen have drawn attention to the fact that Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire (1694–1778), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) consciously deployed revolutionary rhetoric to distinguish the practical mathematical and experimental orientation of 17th- and 18th-century natural philosophers from those of their medieval and even ancient predecessors (I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, 1985, 197–261; David Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield,” Re- appraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert West- man, 1990, 6–10; H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, 1994, 22–27). 19th- and 20th-century proponents of progress and modernity accepted this rhetoric as an accurate description of the radical social and intellectual transformations that occurred between the 16th and 17th centuries, repeat- ing, reinforcing and elaborating on such claims in history, philosophy and social theory (I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, 1985, 273–351; David Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butter- field,” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert Westman, 1990, 10–13; H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, 1994, 21–121). Major schools of thought from Idealism and Positivism to Marxism embraced this vision of historical rupture, so much so that the term ‘Indus- trial Revolution’ had already entered common parlance long before it was clearly defined by Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) in a series of lectures between 1878 and 1883 (Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, 1884), as had the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ before it was first clearly defined by the historian of science, Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), in 1939 (Études Gali- léennes, 1939–1940). A common feature of narratives of revolutionary intellectual and techni- cal change during the modern period is the assumption (usually explicit but sometimes not) that earlier periods – and, in particular, the Middle Ages – were marked by intellectual sterility and scientific and technological stagnation. Indeed, modernist exceptionalists of several philosophical and political persuasions across a number of disciplines have relied on narrative forms which sharply distinguish between the modern period and the medieval and ancient periods, emphasizing discontinuity over continuity in the social, political and intellectual spheres. Thus, the Scientific Revolution marked a significant transformation in the aims, methods and techniques of natural philosophy and the physical AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages 970 sciences between the medieval and modern periods, while the British Agri- cultural (or Agrarian) Revolution was characterized by significant improve- ments in agricultural productivity and output over the essentially medieval techniques that had continued during the early modern period, thereby lay- ing the foundations for, or occurring in parallel with, the Industrial Revol- ution. Likewise, the Industrial Revolution marked a period during the latter half of the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries when

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